Two-piece cartons comprising a bottom part and a lid or top part which is placed over the bottom part, acting as a closure, are well known. These cartons are often used for such purposes as shipping and storage, and hold a variety of items, such as business forms and other such items. Generally, the cartons are rectangular in configuration having side, end, and top and bottom panels, wherein the lid side and end panels slide over and downward against the bottom part side and end panels, in a close fitting relationship with the bottom part panels. Normally the lid side and end panels are relatively short in height dimension, in contrast to the bottom part wherein these panels are relatively deep or long in height, to permit the carton to hold a large number of whatever items are contained in the carton.
Although one might consider a generally rectangular shipping carton to be an ideal mode for shipping and storing a loose pack of forms, several problems have made this particular end use for shipping and storing one-ply cut sheet forms less than practical. One is that stacked items, such as cut sheet forms, are not readily removable on a one-by-one basis from deep recesses such as a carton. Removal generally requires gripping and removing several forms or even the whole stack. Another problem is that the cartons are not resistant to moisture transmission, and the contents in the absence of special precautions, are susceptible to changes in atmospheric conditions. This is especially undesirable in the case of computer cut sheet forms because of the requirement, in the operation of computers, that humidity conditions in the environs of the computer be closely controlled.
As a result, it has been conventional practice in the shipment and storage of computer forms to shrink wrap small sets of the forms into packs, for instance about 500 sheets each, and then place these packs in a carton. The customer, on receipt of a shipment, individually unwraps a pack, each time an old pack is exhausted, and disposes of the shrink film and chipboard used to separate the individual packs. This has the obvious undesirable features that, first, the step of unwrapping a pack is time-consuming and, second, many forms are in a loose stacked condition until use, once a pack is unwrapped.
One object of the present invention is to provide a shipping carton which can be used for a large number of forms in which wrapping individual packs of forms is unnecessary.
Another object of the present invention is to provide such a carton which can also be used for storage of the forms, i.e., one in which removal of the forms one at a time is made easily possible.